It all makes for a kinder, gentler Kafkaesque nightmare, one whose nondescript hero almost deserves his rather convenient,...
A German biologist, long resident in America, learns that he’s inherited a half-share in an apartment building in the former East Berlin—beginning a comedy of misfits he narrowly escapes with his life, though without all his dignity.
The building, Eduard Hoffmann learns, is worth perhaps two million Deutschemarks: certainly enough to repay the inconvenience his brother Lothar in New Zealand isn’t willing to take to settle the paperwork. On leaving his teaching job in Stanford for a research position in the new Berlin, however, Eduard finds that the graffitied palace is full to overflowing of unapologetic and militant squatters, that he hasn’t a chance of evicting them unless he commits to costly renovations, and that meanwhile (the time limit for renouncing his inheritance having past), he’s getting dunned for their water, power, and trash pickup. Nor is there any guarantee that Egon Hoffmann, the unknown grandfather who left Eduard and Lothar this mare’s nest, had any more legal right to it than the squatters, who, with the help of an obliging press, paint Egon as a Nazi functionary who purchased the property from its fleeing Jewish owner for a song. Will Eduard’s claims stand up in court? Does he even want them to, when he’s distracted not only by his ever-ready guilt, but also by his beautiful wife Jenny’s confession that he’s never given her an orgasm, then by a new affair with a dispassionately forward colleague who clearly doesn’t share Jenny’s complaint? As Eduard rushes helter-skelter trying to prop up his house of cards, it becomes clear that Schneider (Couplings, 1996, etc.) has cunningly devised each of the traps he’s caught in as metaphors for the problems of reunification between Ossis and Wessis.
It all makes for a kinder, gentler Kafkaesque nightmare, one whose nondescript hero almost deserves his rather convenient, even hokey, denouement.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-14654-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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